M$ opens its Vista OS kimono

[Alpine]

Aero, aero, what's going on here then

SOFTWARE FIRM Microsoft has decided to go public on the elements of its future Vista OS, barely a week after it inadvertently published the details on its web site.


And it said all the versions of Vista will be available during the second half of this year.

The firm said there will be six versions of Vista - two business ones, three consumer ones, and one for "emerging markets".

It claims the number of offerings matches that currently available for Windows XPire. The versions are Vista Business, Vista Enterprise, Vista Home Basic, Vista Home Premium, Vista Ultimate and Vista Starter.

The product offerings will aim at dragging 64-bit computing, Media Centre and Tablet PCs into the mainstream. It may have more of a problem with the last two than with the first.

Vista Business is aimed at small and medium businesses and will include Aero graphics, Windows Flip and Flip 3D.

Enterprise will support hardware encryption tech and offer a single digital "image" for corporations but will only be available to PCs covered by "Software Assurance" or an "Enterprise" agreement. It will include "Virtual PC Express" so legacy apps can run on legacy WIndows OSes virtually. It also includes a subsystem for Unix apps and it will offer Aero too.

Home Basic will be "safer, more reliable and more productive" and will include parental controls. The Premium edition appers to support notebooks as well as desktops and supports mediaa features, all that Basic has but comes with Aero, better search facilities, Media Centre stuff, Tablet PC tech, and integrated DVD burning.

According to the Vole, Vista Ultimate "has it all". That is to say it is the uncut version of the above. The Vista Starter is a 32-bit OS aimed at countries which are likely to be using older PCs. It will be cheaper. This also implies the above are 64-bit systems. Microsoft doesn't mention the versions the EU wants it to release which don't have the Windows Media Player, the so-called N versions. Nor does it give details of pricing, nor what performance gains we can expect to see when the OS is running on dual or perhaps four core processors. In fact, it's basically just confirmed what it leaked inadvertently, earlier.

The INQuirer